Ada Lovelace is a compellingly romantic figure, irresistible in today’s age of equal geeky opportunities.
The daughter of "mad, bad and dangerous to know" Lord Byron, her mathematics-loving mother Annabella Milibanke purportedly beat the poet out of her with relentless studies in science, maths and logic.
A beauty enthralled by …

Re: Grace Hopper

Re: Grace Hopper

Re: Grace Hopper

I hadn't heard of Grace Hopper (1906-92) before, so thank you for bringing her to our attention.

However, I would point out that she had two circumstantial advantages over Ada Lovelace (1815-52): She lived a full life during an age when computing technology of sorts had become available. Ada could only speculate about the possibilities of a machine that was never realised and was cut off in the prime of life by cancer.

Re: Emmy Noether

I'd never heard of her - ta muchly for the link! but rather than see them in a fight I'd rather all three together took out some other cretins (I have a list...)

And depressing as ever to see from that wiki link that her career and contribution as a German citizen was terminated by the criminal idiocy of the Nazis. Even today one can hear claims that echo the ideological lunacy that lies behind cries such as "Aryan students want Aryan mathematics and not Jewish mathematics." (surely it must be clear to all but the most cretinous that pure mathematics above all other intelligent pursuits lies beyond politicial interpretations?)

Re: Grace Hopper

"Aryan students want Aryan mathematics and not Jewish mathematics"

Unwise - especially if Jewish Mathematics kicks Austrian 99-percenter ass. On the other hand, Nazis were interested in retaining "jewish" Heinz Haber [famous for applying gas warfare for the benefit of the Kaiser somewhat earlier] or even on pilfering smelly ideology from "jewish" philosophers. Very practical people, those Nazis, in a "bully who failed at any original thought" way.

Such things happen in ideologically oriented regimes all the time. Einstein's Relativity was no-go era in the Soviet Union for a long time and later Norbert Wiener's 'Cybernetics' went straight to the 'secret archives' as being incompatible with Marxism ("Cybernetics serves the reactionaries of bourgeois society and idealistic philosphy" - 'Problems of Philosophy', 1953) were no-go areas in the Soviet Union for a long time.

As I say every year

See also Babbage vs Hollerith - things that actually were made and commercially successful are much more glamorous than things that weren't - otherwise people would be dressing up as 1910s CTR salesmen - DarkSuitWhiteShirtPolishedShoesPunk doesn't have the same ring to it.

Re: As I say every year

Because, yawn, the steampunk crowd go in for an imagined world in which electricity didn't happen and so like the Difference Engine, while Grace Hopper worked with electromechanical and electronic computers. Nothing at all to do with titles.

We should be far more interested in why the scientific and mathematical establishment spent such a long time keeping women down despite the Victorian examples. When I got to University my supervisor was being taunted with calls of "Nobel for Jo Bell!" owing to his perceived failure to give her sufficient credit on the pulsar paper, nearly a century and a half after Babbage gave Ada due credit for her work.

Re: As I say every year

Well, yes, obviously, clearly I needed to spell things out in more detail with less shorthand... OK, then, why do people in the 'geek community' prefer people who failed to actually achieve ever much, over people who actually achieved real things in the messy real world? I think you are naive to think that the Countess vs Rear Admiral thing i.e. some vicarious imagining of what it would have been like to be one of the aristocracy in a stratified society isn't part of it.

oh?

“The IT industry uses Ada as a kind of mascot to disguise what is really a bad situation for women in the field.”

I have a hard time making any sense out of this statement. As far as I can tell, the disguise isn't working--nobody seems to think that women are in a great situation, whatever explanations they may provide for this--and practically nobody outside the avionics community thinks about Ada, the countess or the language, more than a couple of times a year.

Next up: the Navy uses JOVIAL to disguise what is really a bad situation for extroverts in the field.

Recognition of Mary Somerville

She did at least have an Oxford college named after her (albeit posthumously), which is better going than a programming language that's now hardly used outside the military.

Proper recognition of women in the history of science is very difficult. I wrote a book a few years ago on the key figures in systems & cybernetics. Despite a lot of agonising, we were only able to include 3 out of 30 who were women. That wasn't because we didn't try, it just reflected the sexist history. It may also have reflected our own biases, of course.

Causes need figure heads

So Ada Lovelace may not have quite been the genius she is alluded to have been, but causes need figure heads and she fills that role nicely. So concentrate on the cause, not on the quibbling about who would be the best icon.

Re: Causes need figure heads

I think the cause suffers if she is just a figure head. Fortunately, we have the likes of Faraday and Babbage to speak up for her. Unlike the modern day revisionists, they actually knew her and they were demonstrably top-flight scientists themselves, so if they reckon she was in their league then I'll settle for that.

Re: Behind Every famous woman...

Re: Behind Every famous woman...

Sadly behind any successful women is a crowd of others with their claws out.

Back in the 80s HP ran some job ads looking for support engineers. The feminist readers of The Grauniad went up in arms because they used a picture of one of the Engineers from the support centre, only the feminists could accept that it could be a Engineer in the pictures, so they must have used a model. Duh.

* PUNCHED cards

Re: * PUNCHED cards

They are cards that have been PUNCHED.

Punched cards are cards that have been punched, yes. I confess that I also use the term for cards that have not yet been punched -- they know their fate!

However, I can't take exception to the use of "punch cards" for cards that are designed to be punched, whether or not they've been punched yet. It's American English, I've no doubt of that, but it gets the idea across.

Of course, in the UK we would use a properly gerundival form: "punching cards". Not cards that punch, but cards that are for punching.

Turing too

Chauvinist nonsense

The 'scientific historians' who denigrated Ada Lovelace's achievements seem to have a very poor appreciation of science. I rather doubt that they know much in the way of mathematics either. It is only necessary to read the notes to her translation to realise that besides being able to write with a rare clarity the Countess of Lovelace also had a deep understanding of the basics of computing; clearly outlining, for just one example, the essential differences between program and data.

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Lovelace/lovelace.htm#A

I think we need to persuade Lewis to stump up enough luncheon vouchers to cover Verity Stob's expenses to have a word with them. Scientific historians indeed.

"But my dear, have you ever THOUGHT what would happen if your machine PRINTED ITS OWN CARDS?"

> the essential differences between program and data...

Ah, but things become far more interesting when you notice that there IS NO ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE. That's when computer science starts in earnest and you fire up your Lisp interpreter.

This is a batch-processing calculator - one program acting on one input - and it is being developed by coming at it from the engineering side of things, not from the theoretical side. There is an allusion to the looping construct: "By the introduction of the system of backing into the Jacquard-loom itself, patterns which should possess symmetry, and follow regular laws of any extent, might be woven by means of comparatively few cards.... This process may obviously be repeated any number of times." Evidently she makes no distinction between what the machine would be able to do when capable of FOR loops - and what the machine would be able to do when capable of WHILE loops. Might she have developed these ideas later? Who knows...

Re: "But my dear, have you ever THOUGHT what would happen if your machine PRINTED ITS OWN CARDS?"

It seems that Countess Lovelace may indeed have considered such a possibility: She jests:

"The operating mechanism can even be thrown into action independently of any object to operate upon (although of course no result could then be developed)."

Clearly she forsees that the engine's outputs may be other than merely numerical:

"Again, it might act upon other things besides number, were objects found whose mutual fundamental relations could be expressed by those of the abstract science of operations, and which should be also susceptible of adaptations to the action of the operating notation and mechanism of the engine."

Doesn't the first part of Gôdel's Incompleteness Theorem set out to prove that this sort of "mutual fundamental relationship" is indeed logically valid?

As for the suggestion that the analytic engine is "a batch-processing calculator", she writes:

"The bounds of arithmetic were however outstepped the moment the idea of applying the cards had occurred; and the Analytical Engine does not occupy common ground with mere 'calculating machines'. It holds a position wholly its own; and the considerations it suggests are most interesting in their nature."

It remains as an exercise for the reader to find her descriptions of loops. I found two in the notes quite easily. And I find the text awesome.